Real, True Christians®: The Bible is the infallible and perfect word of God revealed to humans through divine inspiration
Me, a fake Christian: The Bible contains a book of sex poems, several recipes, and a story about a guy who got mad at a tree

Okay, I have to question the physics here. Throwing an object that isn’t all that massive, and then promptly being able to spin on a dime, dive to catch it (and it has to have a lot of lateral motion for a dive to even be necessary), and fall FASTER than it is? The only way for that to work is if Joyce has superhuman speed and refle-…

I had an unusual experience with shedding my childhood religion, because I started rethinking things at age 12 (puberty made me keenly aware that I was transgender, and I’d already been kind of taken with the idea of being ‘turned into a girl’ somehow prior to that), then it broke down entirely at age 14.

There were a bunch of factors:
– I was homeschooled in a way where I had no peer group and barely saw anyone besides my mom and dad most days, so there wasn’t much of a social life to lose.
– The social life I got instead was by going on the internet to forums and chat rooms related to video games- which I started doing in secret at age 11 because I was forbidden to go to chat rooms, but my interest outweighed the relatively weak warnings they’d given. (Not sure how I pushed through to this conclusion so early, I was pretty young.) The result was seeing a bunch of people of different religions and philosophies arguing all sorts of things but also the inevitable realization that some non-christians were nice (and some christians were jerks), undermining my parents’ claim that christians had some sort of monopoly on not being jerks.
– The trans thing I already mentioned. And when I started tentatively feeling out how my parents felt about it, the reaction was so bad (my mother threatened to beat me once, and in later years she claims she doesn’t remember it) that I became even more secretive around them.
– All my grandparents died by or around then.
– At age 13 I started getting into a relationship with someone who had severe mental issues and then the next year when I was 14, according to their friends who went to the same forum, that person killed themselves after a big nasty fight and a breakdown in job and housing prospects. This was a big ‘prayer is useless’ experience for me.
– My parents had gone to church when I was a small child, but stopped from the time I was about 8 to 14 because we moved to a different town and they started taking care of my ailing grandfather fulltime until he passed away, and then the took a while to find a church they liked.
– When they did find a church they liked, it seemed super fakey and plasticy and terrible to me. They were big on televangelism-style ‘slain in the spirit’ sorts of stuff.

And that’s how I pretty much became an atheist-leaning agnostic at age 14. Fast forward to age 18 when I moved the heck away from Texas and never looked back, and the result is a much easier time severing my childhood religion than most.

I’m pretty sure that’s atypical though, as most trans people I’ve met only seem to figure things out in their 20s, as do many religion-changing people. I think public school (and the lack of experiences with death) makes for a whole different context than what I experienced.